A friend at work was recently hoping to buy his first house and asked me where to look. “That depends on what you need”, I said, like a typical consultant. But it got me thinking.
Knowing the criteria in question, I had some general views, but they didn’t even convince me. So I turned to data. Fortunately, I could scrape data on the criteria I sought for all English districts:
Commuting time by car (weight of 15) – I could’ve used ggmap but had an old copy of Microsoft MapPoint, which proved easier
Average age of the district’s residents (weight of 1) – Like the remaining criteria, this data came from the ONS site
Typical cost of housing in the district (weight of 6)
Standardised crime statistics for the district (weight of 6)
Educational achievement in the district (weight of 6)
Level of deprivation in the district (weight of 3)
I then pulled all this together into a weighted desirability score and mapped it. And, thinking optimistically, it must have helped my friend, as he ended-up buying a property in district rated as highly desirable.
Here are the results: